Fig. 20.—PLAN OF OVEN AT NOUGARET.
A very similar hut is still in use among the Finns, but no longer as a habitation. It is employed for bathing purposes. A fire is lighted in it, and stones are heated in the fire red hot, then plunged in a vessel of water. This generates steam, and the bather enters the bee-hive hut, shuts the door, and is parboiled in the steam. Now, the inconvenience of these bee-hive huts was obvious. Intense heat could be generated in them, but owing to their smallness, a whole family could not live in one. In the Fostbraethra Saga, an Icelandic account of transactions in the eleventh century, that comes to us in a twelfth century form, is an account of how one Thormod went to Greenland. Having committed a murder there, he took refuge with an old woman in her hut. When his foes came to seek him, she lit a fire on the hearth, and filled the hut with smoke, so that they could not see who was in it. But one man climbed on the roof and pulled the plug out of the chimney hole, whereupon the atmosphere within cleared. In time the long house with four corners to it was discovered or adopted. This was an immense advance in comfort. But, at the same time, the peculiar advantage of the bee-hive hut was not lost sight of. If human beings had been baked and boiled therein—why not their bread and their meat? They saw that a bee-hive hut was a hot-air chamber retaining the heat for an extraordinary length of time. So the next step in civilisation was to build the bee-hive hut on a smaller scale for the sake of boiling and stewing. In the year 1891 I exhumed on the edge of Trewortha Marsh, on the Cornish moors, an ancient settlement. The houses were all oblong. The principal house consisted of two great halls. The upper hall was divided by stone screens into stalls, and in front of each stall had been formerly a hearth. In each stall a family had lived, each family had enjoyed its own fire, burning on the ground. But such an open fire would not bake. The inmates had knowledge of corn, for we found a hand quern for grinding it. In order to bake, they had erected independent huts, with bee-hive ovens in the walls, identical in structure with the old bee-hive huts, and the reddened stones showed that fires had been lighted in these for baking purposes. But that was not all, we found heaps of burnt pebbles about the size of a goose-egg. These had been employed for throwing into vessels of water either to boil them, or to generate steam for baking purposes.
Fig. 21.—SECTION OF GRANITE OVEN, ALTARNON, CORNWALL. Date, 16th century.
A common English word has completely lost its primitive signification. That word is stove. The stove is the Norse word stofa, and the German stube. It does not mean a heating apparatus, but a warm chamber.
There is a curious old book, “The Gardener’s Dictionary,” by Philip Miller, the fourth edition of which was published in 1754. He gives an account of greenhouses and conservatories as places usually unheated. “I suppose,” says he, “many people will be surprised to see me direct the making of flues under a greenhouse; but though perhaps it may happen that there will be no necessity to make any fires in them for two or three years together, yet in very hard winters they will prove extremely useful.” But when the author comes to hothouses, he describes them under the name of “stoves.”
Fig. 22.—EARTHENWARE OVEN AS IN USE AT PRESENT.
The stove is a hot chamber, heated maybe by an oven, but we have turned the name about, and we apply it mistakenly to the heating apparatus.